The Snowflake (6 page)

“All right, then.” Buck turned toward the onlookers. “Let’s get to Dawson, shall we?”

Chapter Four

We’re close. Keep moving!” Buck motioned us forward, his face set in unyielding lines of survival.

I glanced over at him and tried to hide my very real fear. Sometimes when I blinked, my eyes refused to focus for a few seconds. When I leaned my head to one side or the other to take the next trudging step, dizziness flooded me. I didn’t say anything to Buck, but I knew he had noticed. He stayed closer than ever by my side and glanced at me often.

Toward evening I was swaying with exhaustion. When Buck stopped, I tried to stop with him, but my legs buckled in a half movement of stopping and continuing forward as I had done all day.

Buck caught me and pulled me in close. His strength was less than the other time he had held me in his arms, but he was still core strong as he demanded in my ear, “Fight Ellen. I can’t lose you too.”

I didn’t know if I could do it. The sting of snow-wind, needle sharp and biting, lacerated my face. I looked away from him, looked farther ahead at the miles upon miles of nothing but rolling white. Above me black buzzards circled, eternally patient in nature’s ability to deliver their dinner. My breath came in pants. My heart pounded against the cage of my ribs, against the thin layer of flesh that stood between me and the arctic cold.

“Can you keep going?”

I nodded but wasn’t sure I believed it.

Buck called for the troops to continue.

The men were close on my heels as I was on Buck’s. The sleds cut the path through ten inches of top powder. Their rudders and paw prints made a rough path but better than anything my shaking leg muscles could do. Hunched-up backs and clawing feet—I loved those dogs.

So cold.

The thought protruded again, but I tried to shake it off, create some kind of shield where it would hit, fall to the ground unrecognized. My breath froze against my chin and cheeks and crackled there when I pressed my numb lips together. The moccasins were doing their work as I could still feel my feet . . . but the rest of me? I couldn’t feel anything save the blink of my eyes against unknown depths of exhaustion. We were climbing uphill now.

I must have fallen behind.

I don’t remember seeing the dark coats of the men in our party passing me. I didn’t remember falling. But it was bliss.

Face-first in a fluffy death.

I turned my head out of the snow, rolled over, and stared at the darkening sky. Each day seemed shorter than the last, just as my life, spiraling down to that final dark moment. A smile froze upon my face. “Jonah, are you there?”

A little laugh escaped my chest, and then I coughed and coughed.

When the spasms stopped, I spread my arms out wide and peered heavenward.
Is he there, Lord? Will I see him now? Is he finally whole?

I closed my eyes and imagined heaven. I imagined pearly gates and the face of Jesus and then, as I drifted into a nether land between here and there, lost and forgotten images played across my mind. I drew in a big breath, and the cold shot all the way to my head. It lingered there, touching spots, awakening memories I’d long forgotten.

I saw Grandpa Ned and Nanna, how they used to come and whisk us away for a week or two in the summer months. I’d almost felt normal by the end of those visits. And then there was Christmas. They always came for a few precious days at Christmas. Nanna made Jonah and me gingerbread and hot cocoa and then every evening told us stories about her life and our mother’s life before . . . when she was happy. And Grandpa took us out to find the perfect Christmas tree. Sometimes the jolly sound would even coax my mother from her room.

My chest shook in a violent spasm, and I didn’t know if it was the cold or the memory that was so real.

Mother had walked with a stilted gait, as if each step might bring some disaster. I rushed forward and grasped her arm, so frail and thin I wondered that I couldn’t see right through her, and helped her to the scrabbly green chair by the Christmas tree.

She smiled down at me, making my heart so happy I thought it would burst from my chest. I hung by her chair offering to fetch her sweets, laughing too loud at something Nanna said, and cavorting with Jonah.

Then it happened. “I need to go lie back down, Ellen. You and Jonah quiet down now.”

I watched her retreating figure with a growing hole in the middle of my chest—torn, ripped, ragged, bleeding. I sank to the floor and stared at the Christmas tree.

Christmas. Who needed it? My father left us right before Christmas. Everything changed at Christmas.

“Get her out! Get her on her feet!”

The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t rouse the energy to care. My body was hefted, raised upright. My head fell toward my right shoulder and bobbed up and down as they heaved me to my feet.

“Walk, Ellen. You have to get your heart pumping!”

The voice was so familiar. It had a warm feeling to it that lent my heart a spark. I wanted to grasp that spark, hold it in my hands, and blow life on it, but I didn’t have the energy, only smiles. I smiled at the voice. I tried to laugh, but the sound came out hoarse and rasping, the cold snatching away my voice.

They propped me up—who I did not know. They took my arms and wrapped them around shaking shoulders and marched me.

My legs wobbled like a newborn calf. Half dragging me and half stumbling, we plowed through the frozen deep. My breath came fast now, and then a strange anxiety rushed through my body making it hum with energy. Every nerve began to tingle.

I had almost died! I wanted to
live!

As the blood flowed through my veins, I felt the need to push my feet against the ground and walk. I gritted my teeth against the cold and the pain and panted with the effort to bring my body back to life.

Buck’s harsh whisper was in my ear. He had been there at my side all along, saying the same thing over and over. “Don’t give up. I can’t lose you. Ellen! Ellen, do you hear me. Walk! Keep walking. Don’t you dare give up!”

Some of the other men had built a fire, and as soon as I was able to stand on my own, Buck pushed me up close to it. If I had stood any closer, I would have singed off my eyelashes. Buck unbuttoned his coat and pulled me into his chest, me facing the fire with his determined strength at my back. He wrapped the sides of the fur-lined leather around me and leaned his head toward my neck, as if to take all of my cold into himself.

I pressed back into his chest, felt the warmth seep through my skin, and thought of ways to bind him to me. I couldn’t help it. I craved commitment from a man like this—a man with a steady, unchanging nature. A man who would honor his promises. A man who would never, ever leave his wife and children at Christmastime.

There was only one problem—I wasn’t that kind of woman. I’d left Jonah, abandoned my promise, and proved myself no better than
him
. I gazed, unseeing, into the roaring fire, feeling undeserving of the warmth that was bringing me back into the land of the living. The truth closed around my heart like a vise . . .

I was my father’s daughter after all.

I battled with sleep that night. Death hovered around us like a thick fog. My dreams were awake and haunted. My body shivered in constant agony.

Buck pulled me in closer to his chest and wrapped his arm around my middle. Like the others we slept in sleeping furs close to the fire. Buck and I shared one and no one commented on it. I think the men were desperate enough to cuddle up to each other, but they opted for scooting as close to the fire as they dared. Every hour or so someone would get up and pile on more sticks and branches to keep the fire going all night. We were too cold to sleep soundly enough to let it die out.

“We’re going to make it,” Buck whispered next to my ear when the sounds of snoring from the men filled the night.

I nodded but was still afraid. Now, when I had every reason to live, it seemed the life force inside me was fading and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. “Talk to me,” I whispered, trying to hold back the panic. If I let myself drift off to sleep, I might never wake again.

Buck rubbed his hand up and down the length of my shivering arm. “What do you want to talk about?”

“Anything. Just keep talking to me. Please.”

“Well, let’s see. I left home when I was seventeen.”

“That’s young. Why?”

“My parents were corn farmers in Illinois. Pa expected that I would stick around and follow in his footsteps, but I wanted to see the world. My cousin Stephen and I decided to run off. He was eighteen so no one would think much about his disappearance, but I knew I would have to be gone awhile before I let my folks know I was okay or they would come after me.”

“They must have been so worried.” But another part of me thought it might have been wonderful. If I had left home at eighteen, my whole life would have been different. My mother hadn’t tied me to my brother with a deathbed promise until I was nineteen.

“I felt a little bad about that, but I only let a few months go by and a lot of distance when I wrote to them. Stephen and I ended up in California, working on the docks, loading and unloading ships in San Francisco Bay. One day we were horsing around and decided to hide aboard one of them. Somehow we got bolted in an enclosed area in the cargo section of the hull. Next thing we knew, we were on our way to Brazil and then Argentina with a ship full of grain. What started as a lark turned into a five-year adventure on the high seas.”

I thought of all the places he must have seen. It was hard for me to imagine such a carefree and adventurous life. “How did you end up in Alaska?”

“A ship.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “Fish, sealskin, and whale blubber make a good export business. Stephen and I saved up enough money to buy our own ship, and then we headed for Alaska to set up our trading venture. We made friends with the Tlingit and other natives along the coast. In six more years we had a whole fleet of ships trading all over the world, and our company brought work to the struggling coastal villages. It turned out even better than we dreamed it would.”

“Is that how you met your wife? In one of those villages?”

“Yes. When I first met her, she was sixteen and I was twenty-one. Her father asked that I wait two years before marrying her.” His voice took on a faraway tone. “When I came to her village, she would run out to meet me with such exuberance, and then she would stop and look down, so shy, while I approached. It took a good while for me to get her to open up and talk, but . . . I just knew she was the one.”

A stab of jealousy ripped through my stomach, surprising me with its intensity. The feeling was followed by shame. What right did I have to be jealous? None. “So you were married five years before she was killed.”

“I will never forgive myself for taking her to Skagway with me. I knew the land was changing since the gold rush. I knew how dangerous it could be.”

Buck’s voice held all the bitterness of self-recrimination, and I could imagine the game of “what-ifs” he must have played over and over in his mind. “You couldn’t have known what would happen, Buck.” I tried to comfort him with soft words. “Where did you live?”

“We had a nice house in Sitka. I still do I guess, but I will probably sell it. I’m not sure where I will live after I find the man who shot her. I guess I’m a wanderer again.”

I liked the idea that we were both wanderers, but I wasn’t sure that I should. “I don’t know where I will live either.” My shivering had stopped, and I turned onto my back and looked up through the darkness at the pinpoints of starlight. Buck was facing me on his side with his head propped up on his hand, his eyes glinting like silver in sthe diffused light. I reached up and touched his cheek. “But I do know one thing.”

“What’s that?” His voice was pained and raspy.

“I’m glad to be alive. Thank you, Buck.”

Inch by slow inch, he leaned toward me, and I thought he would kiss me, but there was enough light from the fire to see the battle raging in his eyes. His breath fanned across my face. I tilted my chin up in acquiescence, but he stopped, pulled back, and sighed.